Occasionally there was a figure which had lost its capital, and so looked like a broken pillar, a sugar loaf, a pear.
Imbedded in these grotesques of sandstone were fossils of wood, of fresh-water shells, and of fishes.
It was a land of extravagances and of wonders.

The marvellous adventures of the "Arabian Nights" would have seemed natural in it.

It reminded you after a vague fashion of the scenery suggested to the imagination by some of its details or those of the "Pilgrim's Progress." Sindbad the Sailor carrying the Old Man of the Sea; Giant Despair scowling from a make-believe window in a fictitious castle of eroded sandstone; a roc with wings eighty feet long, poising on a giddy pinnacle to pounce upon an elephant; pilgrim Christian advancing with sword and buckler against a demon guarding some rocky portal, would have excited no astonishment here.
Of a sudden there came an adventure which gave opening for knight-errantry.

As Thurstane, Coronado, and Texas Smith were riding a few hundred yards ahead of the caravan, and just emerging from what seemed an enormous court or public square, surrounded by ruined edifices of gigantic magnitude, they discovered a man running toward them in a style which reminded the Lieutenant of Timorous and Mistrust flying from the lions.
Impossible to see what he was afraid of; there was a broad, yellow plain, dotted with monuments of sandstone; no living thing visible but this man running.
He was an American; at least he had the clothes of one.

As he approached, he appeared to be a lean, lank, narrow-shouldered, yellow-faced, yellow-haired creature, such as you might expect to find on Cape Cod or thereabouts.